Well in the business world, the name of smallness is earned by small medium sized enterprise. With their flat managment style and their number of employees, sme are fast in meeting demands of the globalised and the demanding technologies. An organization with 9 employees are known as micro enterprise and from 10 to 49, they are called small medium sized enterprise and from 50 -250, large medium sized enterprise. The purpose of relating these facts is that large organizations with more than 1000 employees are implying the flat management style of the SME. Why?
Well its very simple in a large organizations there are more policies and bureaurcratic environment as we had studies in the cases of PT Timah and the FBI one, so there are actually "logjams " that prevents any decisions from becoming delayed. However the interesting thing that I came across (Oxman & Smith,2003) views, whose opinions was against the whole restructuring thing or in other words not in favour of the turnaround management.
For a sme, the turnaround managemnet is very costly and the other technique (Welter,2008)suggested that one should use the foresight methods in order to avoid turnaround management, but then we have other advises like being Protean, which are categorised as :"organizational agility”,” continuous process improvement” and “enterprise wide real-time information" (Wall, 2005).
The small organization grows to be a large organization not based on these views and opinions but initially its journey begins when the owner manager puts huge amount of commitment, time and energy into making it successful.
I found the small medium sized journey very interesting when you actually use this concept for a reatil store which I will describe in my next post.
However as all know the small medium sized journey though begins with the founding owner but it does not end with the founding father in fact the owner manager has to step down, sometimes even forced by creditors or venture capitalists. This happens in the resource maturity stage, in times of rapid growth when the owner manager doesn't posses the skills to make this growth smooth or can not stop from "doing", when he/she needs to be "delegating".In the lifecyle model of Greneir it shows that after the exit the business either is sold to IPO but according to (Churchill & Lewis,1983) , they stated that some organizations tend to mover in the first two stages that is existence and survival.
So it seems that its a vicious cycle, which further means that the story of our small medium sized enterprise only ends when it ultimately bangs into bankruptcy, as (Churchill & Lewis,1983) confirms its mainly due to lack of leadership skill.

References

Churchill, N.C. & V. Lewis (1983), The five stages of small firm growth, Harvard BusinessReview, 53, 43-54

Wall, S.J. (2005) “The Protean Organization: Learning to Love Change”. Organizational Dynamics. Vol 34, no 1, 37-46.

Welter,F (2008) Crisis Management. Lecture, prepared for JIBS on Managing the SME.